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Food recalls are coming in fast and furious and it's often hard to keep track. This is the first in a series of recall round-ups in which we'll share the most up-to-date information on the foods you should be scrutinizing right now.

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Ray Isle (@islewine on Twitter) is Food & Wine's executive wine editor. We trust his every cork pop and decant – and the man can sniff out a bargain to boot. Take it away, Ray.

The other day, I felt the time had come to Vitamix some Bordeaux. Any reasonably sane person, of course, might wonder why. After all, the Vitamix (or at least the Vitamix Professional Series 750) whizzes its razor-sharp steel blades around at 24,000 rpm, which is fast enough to liquify pretty much anything. You could toss a license plate and some pool balls in there and end up with a smoothie; a weird one, but a smoothie nonetheless.

The reason I decided to frappé my French red, though, was to check out the idea of “hyper-decanting,” which is the inspiration of Nathan Myhrvold, ex–chief technology officer of Microsoft, all-around mad-scientist foodie and author of the monumental (meaning it weighs 50 pounds) book Modernist Cuisine. Myhrvold’s idea is pretty straightforward: Ordinary decanting - i.e., pouring your wine into a decanter - achieves its benefits because the wine is exposed to air. Blending it intensifies the exposure, and thus the benefits.

Before we get to the results, I should answer a basic question, which is: “Why the heck decant a wine in the first place?”FULL POST

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While you're frying up some eggs and bacon, we're cooking up something else: a way to celebrate today's food holiday.

A few things are sacred to a South African, and a braai is definitely near the top of that list. A braai (rhymes with fry) is the Saffas version of a barbecue – essentially cooking meat over an open flame. But to us, it goes way beyond that. Its cultural significance is such that braaing has its own day – National Braai Day.

September 24 was designated National Braai Day in 2005. It falls on the same day as Heritage Day – a public holiday that serves to promote “creative expression, our historical inheritance, language, the food we eat as well as the land in which we live,” or in other words, all the things that make South Africa the exceptional place it is.FULL POST